Ball Don't Lie

It’s August, and in the days before school starts it’s also time for basketball camps. To sit cross-legged n a hardwood floor while hoping that everyone else notices the shoes that you mortgaged way, way too much of your allowance to buy while watching a shooting drill as presented by an assistant coach you’ve never heard of.

Or, if you’re lucky, a fringe NBA player. Or, if you’re really, really lucky, the NBA’s Most Improved Player and the greatest basketball player of all time.

Watch Chicago’s Jimmy Butler and Bulls legend Michael Jordan wow the kids at Jordan’s camp, with You Know Who winning things as always:

Unless you have a real soft spot for Ben Gordon’s work off the bench on the 2004-05 Bulls (and, hey, we kind of do), Butler is the best shooting guard the Bulls have had since Jordan retired following the 1997-98 season.

You’re in your second semester of AP Basketball History, you love really good teams, and you love lists. With precious little drama left in the NBA’s 2015 offseason, why don’t we hit the barroom and/or barbershop, pour ourselves a frosty mug of Barbicide, and get to arguin’ over each franchise’s most formidable starting five-man lineup.

Because we don’t like making tough decisions, the lineups will reflect the All-NBA line of thinking. There will be no differentiation between separate forward and guard positions, and the squads will be chosen after careful consideration of individual merits only – we don’t really care if your team’s top shooting guard and point guard don’t get along.

These rankings will roll out based on when each franchise began its NBA life. We continue with the Los Angeles Lakers, a team that inspires little to no debate on the internet.

Hakeem Olajuwon retired from the NBA in 2002. He has not made an All-Star team since 1997, and he is a full two decades removed from leading the Clutch City Houston Rockets to the 1994-95 NBA title. He is 52-years old, and recently he has been better known for crashing NBA drafts, and teaching both Dwight Howard and LeBron James how to work up jab-steps.

It's a Friday afternoon during the summer. You are trying to convince your boss (and perhaps even yourself) that you are doing meaningful work before you clock out for the weekend. Well, stop that.

You and I both know that what you really want to do — what truly lives inside your soul, what you yearn for more than anything else — is to break free of your humdrum workaday lifestyle, cut loose and engulf your pre-happy-hour tedium in the white-hot hellfire of brutal slam dunks, all to the music of the spheres better known as the Quad City DJs' "Space Jam."

This is your best office life, and it is being lived by a hero who goes by the name of "Jake H."

One year after making the somewhat shocking decision to use the 29th pick in the first round of the 2014 draft on Josh Huestis, a lightly regarded prospect who may well have fallenout of the draft entirely if he hadn't agreed to become the NBA's first-ever "domestic draft-and-stash" player, the Oklahoma City Thunder have formally brought the Stanford swingman into the big-league fold.

When Josh Smith kinda, sorta insinuated life would be more difficult playing on an NBA veteran minimum salary this season, the Internet's hot-take police naturally ran with the perceived Latrell Sprewellian angle.

This was the quote that made the rounds after last week's press conference to introduce Smith, who signed a one-year, $1.5 million deal to play for the Clippers in 2015-16, his fourth team in just over two years:

"At the end of the day, you know, I do have a family," he said. "So it is going to be a little harder on me this year. But I'm going to push through it, you know."

We can only imagine how Kevin Garnett will release his ridiculous energy once he eventually moves into a management role with the Minnesota Timberwolves, if only because he's unleashed it all over NBA courts for more than half his life now, but for the time being he remains a starter on a pro basketball team.

He’s gonna start. That’s who he is. KG is a starter. He’s the best power forward on our team, actually. No one rebounds better. He’s the best help defender. No one communicates better. He knows the offense, and he can pass it.

Indeed, Garnett has started every game he's appeared in since his debut in Minnesota's starting lineup on Jan. 30, 1996, midway through his rookie year. That's 1,529 starts in 1,529 combined regular-season and playoff games for the T-Wolves, Boston Celtics and Brooklyn Nets. So, yes, KG fits the description.

Scott was the passenger in a 2015 Chevrolet Tahoe driven by his brother, Antonn Scott, that "failed to yield to officers on Interstate 85" in Banks County, Ga., according to Rob Moore of AccessWDUN.com:

You’re in your second semester of AP Basketball History, you love really good teams, and you love lists. With precious little drama left in the NBA’s 2015 offseason, why don’t we hit the barroom and/or barbershop, pour ourselves a frosty mug of Barbicide, and get to arguin’ over each franchise’s most formidable starting five-man lineup.

Because we don’t like making tough decisions, the lineups will reflect the All-NBA line of thinking. There will be no differentiation between separate forward and guard positions, and the squads will be chosen after careful consideration of individual merits only – we don’t really care if your team’s top shooting guard and point guard don’t get along.

These rankings will roll out based on when each franchise began its NBA life. We continue with the Sacramento Kings, a team that has lived in five different cities while having to deal with a whole litany of bad step-dads.